Quote:
Originally Posted by pilotbob
I'm not really much into typography... but I always wondered this. Is a 12pt fount supposed to produce the same size glyph on a device no matter it's size and resolution? For example, is a 12pt font on a 6inch device the same size as a 12pt font on a 20 inch monitor? Isn't there another way to specify font size, I seem to remember earlier PCs used something other than point sizes... also I think it was the inverse where the bigger the number the smaller the font.
That said, is there any device size independent way to specify a font size whether it be on screen or paper?
Thanks,
BOb
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Actually, forgive me if I'm wrong, but I've always learned that fontsize expressed in .pt came from points or pixels.
This would depend on the resolution of the screen.
Wikipedia states that:
"Today, the traditional point has been supplanted by the desktop publishing point (also called the PostScript point), which has been rounded to an even 72 points to the inch".
I may be totally wrong, but I think this could be true on 144DPI screens.
However the higher the DPI reaches on a screen the harder it is to read, and the smaller the letters become on screen.
(eg: the 5" 800x600 screen reader has a higher DPI (220ppi)than an 6" screen with the same resolution(166DPI). On the 5" the fonts will be considerably smaller, though not less clear, since they both have the same resolution (eg: pt 12 has 12 pixels in height on both the 5" and on the 6" screen))
CRT monitors had greater issues here, since you could literally have a dpi of over 250(by having extreme high resolutions in the likes of 2560x2048 or something absurd, on a 21" screen); but LCD screens are pretty consistant @ around 150dpi, partly because of the marketing. Laptops generally come in 14 or 15" screens 1280x800 for widescreen, 15-16 have 13?? x ??? - 17" => 1600 x 1024 resolution...etc...
Though Fujitsu recently released a high grade LCD of 1280x800 screen in a 5" display on the u2010, one of their mini laptops!, (=costly)
there's much mathemathics behind it, again I could be wrong but I think that a screen's DPI is measured by measuring the amount of pixels horizontally, and vertically and out of them the diagonal ones are calculated.
On a perfect square screen that would be eg:
SQ root of (eg: 150pix horizontal ^2 + 150 pix vertical ^2) = 212 DPI
I believe there's lots behind the scenes here I don't know. But I think pixels are pixels per inch bound. Meaning on every screen with ?144DPI? a 72pt will measure 1" in height.
Then another question might be if this holds true for both 4/3 and 16/9 resolution...
I can't tell you.. (don't know)